SOURCE: "Telling Lies and Stories: Peter Carey's Bliss," in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 35, No. 4, Winter, 1989, pp. 637-53.

Hassall is an Australian educator and critic. In the following essay, he provides a thematic analysis of Bliss.

There are many stories in Peter Carey's Bliss and not a few lies, but there is one story that enjoys a special, privileged status. This is the story of Little Titch that Harry Joy invents under duress and tells to Constable Box and Sergeant Hastings, "the only original story he would ever tell." I want to examine the story of Little Titch, and the sequence of other stories in which it is embedded, as a point of entry into Carey's larger "story" in Bliss, the bildungsroman of Harry Joy's mid-life crisis, his fall into hell, and his eventual attaining of "bliss." A story about telling stories, Bliss is postmodern in its awareness of...